ん, in hiragana or ン in katakana, is one of the Japanese kana, which each represent one mora. ん is the only kana that does not end in a vowel sound (although in certain cases the vowel ending of kana, such as す, is unpronounced). The kana for mu, む/ム, was originally used for the n sound as well, while ん was originally a hentaigana used for both n and mu. In the 1900 Japanese script reforms, hentaigana were officially declared obsolete and ん was officially declared a kana to represent the n sound.
n | |||
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transliteration | n, (m),(ng) | ||
hiragana origin | 无 | ||
katakana origin | 尓 | ||
spelling kana | おしまいのン Oshimai no "n" | ||
unicode | U+3093, U+30F3 | ||
braille | ![]() |
In addition to being the only kana not ending with a vowel sound, it is also the only kana that does not begin any words in standard Japanese (other than foreign loan words such as "Ngorongoro", which is transcribed as ンゴロンゴロ) (see Shiritori). Some regional dialects of Japanese feature words beginning with ん, as do the Ryukyuan languages (which are usually written in the Japanese writing system), in which words starting with ン are common, such as the Okinawan word for miso, nnsu (transcribed as ンース).
The kana is followed by an apostrophe in some systems of transliteration whenever it precedes a vowel or a y- kana, so as to prevent confusion with other kana. However, like every other kana besides yōon, it represents an entire mora, so its pronunciation is, in practice, as close to "nn" as "n". The pronunciation can also change depending on what sounds surround it. These are a few of the ways it can change:
- [n] (before n, t, d, r, ts, and z)
- [m] (before m, p and b)
- [ŋ] (before k and g)
- [ɲ] (before ni, ch and j)
- [ɴ] (at the end of utterances)[a]
- [ɯ͍̃] (before vowels, palatal approximants (y), consonants h, f, s, sh and w)
- [ĩ] (after the vowel i if another vowel, palatal approximant or consonant f, s, sh, h or w follows.)
Form | Rōmaji | Hiragana | Katakana |
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Normal n (ん) | n | ん | ン |
nn n̄[citation needed] |
んん んー |
ンン ンー |
Other additional forms | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Stroke order
editOther communicative representations
editJapanese radiotelephony alphabet | Wabun code |
おしまいのン Oshimai no "N" |
Japanese Navy Signal Flag | Japanese semaphore | Japanese manual syllabary (fingerspelling) | Braille dots-356 Japanese Braille |
- Full Braille representation
ん / ン in Japanese Braille: |
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Preview | ん | ン | ン | | 𛅧 | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Unicode name | HIRAGANA LETTER N | KATAKANA LETTER N | HALFWIDTH KATAKANA LETTER N | HIRAGANA LETTER SMALL N | KATAKANA LETTER SMALL N | |||||
Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex |
Unicode | 12435 | U+3093 | 12531 | U+30F3 | 65437 | U+FF9D | 110947 | U+1B163 | 110951 | U+1B167 |
UTF-8 | 227 130 147 | E3 82 93 | 227 131 179 | E3 83 B3 | 239 190 157 | EF BE 9D | 240 155 133 163 | F0 9B 85 A3 | 240 155 133 167 | F0 9B 85 A7 |
UTF-16 | 12435 | 3093 | 12531 | 30F3 | 65437 | FF9D | 55340 56675 | D82C DD63 | 55340 56679 | D82C DD67 |
Numeric character reference | ん |
ん |
ン |
ン |
ン |
ン |
𛅣 |
𛅣 |
𛅧 |
𛅧 |
Shift JIS[2] | 130 241 | 82 F1 | 131 147 | 83 93 | 221 | DD | ||||
EUC-JP[3] | 164 243 | A4 F3 | 165 243 | A5 F3 | 142 221 | 8E DD | ||||
GB 18030[4] | 164 243 | A4 F3 | 165 243 | A5 F3 | 132 49 155 55 | 84 31 9B 37 | 147 54 134 53 | 93 36 86 35 | ||
EUC-KR[5] / UHC[6] | 170 243 | AA F3 | 171 243 | AB F3 | ||||||
Big5 (non-ETEN kana)[7] | 198 247 | C6 F7 | 199 173 | C7 AD | ||||||
Big5 (ETEN / HKSCS)[8] | 199 122 | C7 7A | 199 239 | C7 EF |
N is the only Katakana without a circled form in Unicode.
Use in the Ainu language
editIn the Ainu language, ン is interchangeable with the small katakana ㇴ as a final n.
Notes
editReferences
edit- ^ Maekawa (2023).
- ^ Unicode Consortium (2015-12-02) [1994-03-08]. "Shift-JIS to Unicode".
- ^ Unicode Consortium; IBM. "EUC-JP-2007". International Components for Unicode.
- ^ Standardization Administration of China (SAC) (2005-11-18). GB 18030-2005: Information Technology—Chinese coded character set.
- ^ Unicode Consortium; IBM. "IBM-970". International Components for Unicode.
- ^ Steele, Shawn (2000). "cp949 to Unicode table". Microsoft / Unicode Consortium.
- ^ Unicode Consortium (2015-12-02) [1994-02-11]. "BIG5 to Unicode table (complete)".
- ^ van Kesteren, Anne. "big5". Encoding Standard. WHATWG.
Sources
edit- Maekawa, Kikuo (2023), "Production of the utterance-final moraic nasal in Japanese: A real-time MRI study", Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 53 (1): 189–212, doi:10.1017/S0025100321000050
Further reading
edit- Oguri, Saori; László, Tony (2005). Darling no atamannaka. Tokyo: Media Factory. ISBN 4-8401-1226-6.